Sunday, May 31, 2015

app smashing design journal entry #2

I really enjoyed this app smash activity! It made me learn about apps that I have seen and been interested in exploring, but could never find the time to explore.
I hope my students will find this video interesting, and that it will serve its purpose well, which is to inform them about myself and about the content in Earth Science. I also want students to be inspired by this activity, so that they will want to complete similar activities this year to enhance their learning. Maybe they will even seek my advice after they see the movie (I am usually the one asking the students for help with technology)!
I had no idea where I wanted to start as far as app selection, so I decided to select the purpose for the project and went from there. Once I had the purpose and a logical sequence for the movie, I began looking at apps to use. Many of the articles and videos I studies in the assigned readings led me to tellagami. I used this app because I think it adds interest to the video. Instead of just seeing me in a video, the project takes on new life with this character and I believe it will be more engaging for students. I then used picCollage to create a picture collage for introducing myself to the students. This app allows users to make photo collages that are colorful, with the addition of cute images, such as hearts, mustaches, sunglasses, etc. I believe the collage turned out cute and the app was easy to use. I also used cut me in, because I really loved being able to put myself in comical pictures that went along with the content of Earth Science. This app contained all the backgrounds I needed, and the use of a stylus (a tip from my son) made it easy to remove myself from pictures for placement in the backgrounds of choice. Once I created the images with cut me in, I added them to explain everything, which allowed me to record my voice and create a movie of the images from cut me in. I then used iMovie to create a movie of the video clips and added sound to liven it up.

I would change a couple of design decisions in this project. The first is the picCollage. I would add at least one more collage to this portion of the movie to make it more interesting, especially since there is a good bit of dialogue in this portion. I would also like to change the background of the tellagami clips to add interest as well. Overall though, I believe this was a success for me, especially with it being my first time “smashing apps”! This activity has prepared me for future creations and tools for helping my students with their future projects.

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